SMARTDEC is a situational awareness system installed for border monitoring and surveillance along Albania’s land and maritime borders, as part of the EU funded effort to develop Albanias Integrated Border Mangement Strategy between 2014-2020). Developed by the Estonian defence company Defendec, SMARTDEC is designed to monitor remote land borders, coastal areas, and other isolated locations. The system combines four main components: A network of ground sensors and detectors; Communication bridges; A mobile command centre; An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform.
Using artificial intelligence, SMARTDEC analyses images captured by its sensors, identifies and classifies objects, and estimates their movement, direction, and speed. The system provides near real-time alerts of human and vehicle movements and is well suited for remote border surveillance due to its battery-powered sensors (with up to 400 days of operation) and encrypted radio communications. In 2017, Albania received equipment from the US government valued at 155,107 US Dollars (approximately 140,000 EUR). Included in this donation were new imaging detectors for the SMARTDEC system to support “the identification of traffickers or irregular migrants”.
As an EU Candidate Country, Albania is an important site of EU border externalisation. EU funding to Albania has signifantly contributed to the development of border surveillance equipment to ensure that individuals attempting to cross the border irregularly are apprehended. This often leads to violent pushbacks within which people’s requests for asylum are ignored, they are subject to physical violence, and returned to Greece without due process.